Mike Leigh’s ‘Mr. Turner’ Paints Complex Portrait of an Artist

CANNES, France — “The sun is god” may sound like the perfect tagline for a hedonistic beach caper set on the Côte d’Azur, but those were actually the final words uttered by the British painter J.M.W. Turner on his deathbed.

“Mr. Turner,”Mike Leigh’s exquisitely shot portrait of the celebrated early 19th century Romantic master of light during his final 25 years, has received glowing praise from the critics and remains high on the list of Palme d’Or contenders.

With superb performances by Leigh’s ensemble cast, which includes Timothy Spall (J.M.W. Turner), Paul Jesson (Turner’s doting barber father, William Turner, senior), Marion Bailey (Sophia Booth, a cheery widowed landlady who becomes Turner’s lover) and Dorothy Atkinson (Hannah Danby, his devoted and occasionally sexually exploited housekeeper), the film had taken years to make. Fortunately, this also meant that the actors had lots of time to work on their characters.

One of the first steps, says Leigh, was deciding that Spall would have to learn to paint convincingly well enough to execute half-finished canvases. But that was only one small detail among other challenges.

“I wanted to show the tension, the contrast, the chemistry between this guy — an eccentric, vulnerable, conflicted complex, emotional, and sometimes disingenuous character — and his extraordinary epic sublime poetic work,” the director says. “It’s a fascinating combination. This is a man who strapped himself to the mast of a ship so that he could paint a snowstorm at sea, who was celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty.”

“As always, there’s no conventional script,” Leigh adds. “I have a very strong structure when I shoot and it’s very tightly scripted through rehearsal.”

Actor Spall in the lead role said “with Mike, it’s all about research, mining what you learn, building characters and then reflecting. You create a parallel universe.”

“There are sometimes little snippets of information that make you realize that you’re not trying build Mr. Popular as a personality,” Spall continues. “Like when Delacroix met Turner, he hated him. He said he was like an English farmer — that he was unpleasant, smelled a bit, and that he couldn’t understand what Turner was talking about.”

Despite the artist’s hulking gargoyle-like looks and a penchant for grunting, Turner has a certain success with women. In one pivotal point in the film–after years of visiting brothels and performing awkward quickies with his housekeeper–Turner falls in love with the simple but soulful and industrious Mrs. Booth, who runs a bed and breakfast in Margate.

“I’m sure they had a riotous sex life, in my imagination,” says actress Marion Bailey. “To explore that, Mike often had us use hand improvisations. Essentially, you’re on your hands and knees, on the floor, in a rehearsal room and you go into character. Tim and I actually conducted our sexual relationship with our hands. It sounds eccentric but you can explore an awful lot of very dark dangerous territory with that very simple process.”

With improvisation come Leigh’s in-house secrets. Since there is no written script, the actors may never be informed about certain events that take place outside of their own scenes.

Atkinson, who plays Turner’s shy, disfigured housekeeper, Hannah, recounts that throughout the entire shoot, actor Paul Jesson (affectionately called “Daddy” by his son) had no clue that Turner and Hannah ever had a sexual relationship. “After the screening of the film with the cast, Paul was completely floored,” the actress says. “He texted me and said, ‘well, I never…!’”

“I don’t think ‘Mr. Turner’ is a biopic—it’s something else,” says Mike Leigh. “It’s not a documentary either — we’re not logging facts for academic purposes. It is about the artist’s emotional journey, his heart. He transcended ordinary landscape painting and takes us to a profound place.”

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